Murder and madness: war trauma, revenge, and academic discomfort with Euripides’ Hecuba and Star Wars: Rebels

Abstract

The history of modern scholarship on Euripides’ characterization of Hecuba is one of simultaneous fascination and revulsion, empathy and horror, understanding and rejection. David Grene and Richard Lattimore cite August Wilhelm Schlegel’s On Dramatic Art and Literature as the juncture wherein dramatic and scholarly opinion of Hecuba soured, a trend that continued with scholars such as JA Spranger, Gilbert Norwood, and JJ Rieske. My project, building from Grace Zanotti’s explorations of Hecuba and Tonya Pollard’s study of Hecuba as essential to Shakespeare’s women, asserts that modern storytelling, particularly the character of Sabine Wren in Star Wars: Rebels, deals with Hecuba more genuinely than post-Schlegel scholars largely have.
The charges against Hecuba are that her character and her actions do not seem to be the work of one character, and that the play may be an amalgamation of several shorter plays that Euripides did not feel met the required length of a dramatic work. As such, they consider the depths of Hecuba’s sorrow at the murder of Polyxena and the heights of her rage at the murder of Polydorus to be two different Hecubas.
I apply Pollard’s examination of Hecuba’s centrality to Shakespeare’s works to the character of Sabine Wren, who has the strongest echoes of Euripides’ Hecuba, encompassing the fullness of emotion from her towering anger at the Galactic Empire to the depth of her sorrow at the near loss of her family. Within that analysis, I argue that scholarship claiming Hecuba as a weak play is unwilling or unable to engage with Hecuba emotionally, and that even Zanotti’s project, which seeks to rationally explain how Hecuba can be both mourner and murderer, is indicative of a trend in modern scholarship to dismiss the validity of those emotional zeniths and nadirs in art.